Writing Programs Worldwide - Profiles of Academic Writing in Many Places, 2012a

Bräuer
STUCK IN A TRADITIONAL ROLE OF WRITING
The role of writing within the academy in the German-speaking area has been
affected by the long-lived spirit of the Early Enlightenment of the eighteenth
century, which views the writer as a medium through which inspiration speaks
in a strong voice leading to an immediate result: a text with a clear message to its
readers. This basic understanding of writing can still be witnessed in many different
facets of the German-speaking academy—in some respects starker than ever,
at least in places where the Bologna Reform has been misunderstood as “streamlining”
what in the past was considered “individualized” learning through trial
and error over too many semesters of college. This influence is true especially
when the modularization of competency-based instruction now leads not only
to a reduction in the number of individual writing tasks, but even to the elimination
of entire task arrangements that, in the past, helped to shape academic
literacy even if only through trial and error. Optional learning arrangements of
the past, including short seminar papers and study group discussions, including
summaries and commentaries eventually leading to an extensive end-of semester
paper, are now often being replaced by large lecture classes with written exams
as the only form of comprehensive writing—and even that expedience is eliminated
when the test is conceptualized as multiple-choice.
In such a constellation, the institution will not see any incentive in the near
future to change the role of writing into a learning tool that needs to be acquired
through formal instruction and through different, individualized practices in
the daily classroom. To see institutions act alternatively probably requires their
sudden realization—a wakeup call—of the shrinking quality in learning and
instructional outcomes based on the written exams and the final thesis. Unfortunately,
since written exams often do not unveil contextualized understanding
of the learner, and the final thesis in many universities of the German-speaking
area does not count substantially in the final grade, I doubt that some institutions
will, for now, even bother looking at the quality of academic literacy.
THE ALTERNATIVE: LESS-STRUCTURED LEARNING
THAT FULFILLS INDIVIDUAL NEEDS
The other tendency which can be witnessed since the Bologna reform started
to unfold in German-speaking higher education is pointing in quite a different
direction. With the support of mostly extra-curricular initiatives such as
centers for writing, language, or academic skills, a growing number of students
engage in a more informal, less-structured learning that feeds their real individual
needs. As authentic, self-responsive learners, they decide whether they
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